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> Navigating to a web page is so much easier than installing an application. Perhaps, but I don't spend a lot of time installing applications, nor am I concern

> Navigating to a web page is so much easier than installing an application. Perhaps, but I don't spend a lot of time installing applications, nor am I concerned about megabytes of disk usage. None of the web applications I use do anything particularly interesting - all of the interesting applications I use are not web apps. Web apps give maximum convenience to developers and sysadmins and in some cases, this is a worthwhile tradeoff, but often enough it just makes for an inferior product.

saurik 5y ago
But the problem is that the premise of web falls apart if you have to install a separate app for every kind of content. I want to be able to have a hyperlink on my website to a TikTok video or an Instagram post and have people actually see it rather than go "ugh I have to install an app to see the content you are linking to". I want to be able to just click around the web without having to ever think about the boundaries between "apps". This is also why a lot of us hate authwalls: "oh god another account I need to set up"... it doesn't take much time to set up an account, but in a world where every single damned website would want an account you will never be done with it. The dual reasons then why you don't spend much time installing apps is because on the one side the web works well enough that people just link to stuff on the web and it works most of the time... and yet on the other side you also see people choose to centralize things into places that are easier to link stuff from, including apps people are more likely to have installed, which is a background force of centralization. The world people (like you) seem to want is one where the web is essentially dead and everyone just sits around in some subset of waller gardens that they don't really leave, with some minimal amount of hyperlinks available to get content in and out of other products. I have a link to a map, well, you better have Google Maps installed or it won't work. That just seems like a depressing failure of vision to me: the goal should be to get the web to the point where it replaces all of these stupid apps we have to have, so no one ever has to decide if an app is "installed or uninstalled" ever again: all content is immediately consumable at all times with nothing other than a URL. And we could be there if people with vested interests--like Apple--didn't stop actively trying to hobble web standards so people were forced to install more apps constantly.
- incrudible 5y ago
  > I want to be able to have a hyperlink on my website to a TikTok video or an Instagram post and... To me, that's not an interesting application. If you want to use the web to share images or videos, that's fine. If you want to create such content however, why not have a native application that can actually take advantage of the hardware? > The world people (like you) seem to want is one where the web is essentially dead and everyone just sits around in some subset of waller gardens that they don't really leave, with some minimal amount of hyperlinks available to get content in and out of other products. Hyperlinks don't necessarily make my life easier. Let's say I want to get <large file> from application A and into application B: The web would just get in the way. I have a file system and all (native) applications can read/write/mmap it. Import/Export workflows exist. It's a solved problem, the web doesn't need to eat everything.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > That just seems like a depressing failure of vision to me: the goal should be to get the web to the point where it replaces all of these stupid apps we have to have, so no one ever has to decide if an app is "installed or uninstalled" ever again: all content is immediately consumable at all times with nothing other than a URL. But then how would the largest companies in the world excise a 15% to 30% tax on the entirety of the mobile app market, and soon the desktop app market, as well?

saurik 5y ago

But the problem is that the premise of web falls apart if you have to install a separate app for every kind of content. I want to be able to have a hyperlink on my website to a TikTok video or an Instagram post and have people actually see it rather than go "ugh I have to install an app to see the content you are linking to". I want to be able to just click around the web without having to ever think about the boundaries between "apps". This is also why a lot of us hate authwalls: "oh god another account I need to set up"... it doesn't take much time to set up an account, but in a world where every single damned website would want an account you will never be done with it. The dual reasons then why you don't spend much time installing apps is because on the one side the web works well enough that people just link to stuff on the web and it works most of the time... and yet on the other side you also see people choose to centralize things into places that are easier to link stuff from, including apps people are more likely to have installed, which is a background force of centralization. The world people (like you) seem to want is one where the web is essentially dead and everyone just sits around in some subset of waller gardens that they don't really leave, with some minimal amount of hyperlinks available to get content in and out of other products. I have a link to a map, well, you better have Google Maps installed or it won't work. That just seems like a depressing failure of vision to me: the goal should be to get the web to the point where it replaces all of these stupid apps we have to have, so no one ever has to decide if an app is "installed or uninstalled" ever again: all content is immediately consumable at all times with nothing other than a URL. And we could be there if people with vested interests--like Apple--didn't stop actively trying to hobble web standards so people were forced to install more apps constantly.

incrudible 5y ago
> I want to be able to have a hyperlink on my website to a TikTok video or an Instagram post and... To me, that's not an interesting application. If you want to use the web to share images or videos, that's fine. If you want to create such content however, why not have a native application that can actually take advantage of the hardware? > The world people (like you) seem to want is one where the web is essentially dead and everyone just sits around in some subset of waller gardens that they don't really leave, with some minimal amount of hyperlinks available to get content in and out of other products. Hyperlinks don't necessarily make my life easier. Let's say I want to get <large file> from application A and into application B: The web would just get in the way. I have a file system and all (native) applications can read/write/mmap it. Import/Export workflows exist. It's a solved problem, the web doesn't need to eat everything.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> That just seems like a depressing failure of vision to me: the goal should be to get the web to the point where it replaces all of these stupid apps we have to have, so no one ever has to decide if an app is "installed or uninstalled" ever again: all content is immediately consumable at all times with nothing other than a URL. But then how would the largest companies in the world excise a 15% to 30% tax on the entirety of the mobile app market, and soon the desktop app market, as well?